Carrick-on-Suir

A Tipperary town on both banks of the Suir, at the river's tidal limit, long tied to the Butlers. Black Tom Butler's Elizabethan manor house, where Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley was arrested in 1583, still stands and is open to the public. The 16th-century song Cailín ó chois na Siúire mé is linked to the town and turns up in Shakespeare's Henry V as "Caleno custure me".

The town, first called Carrig Mac Griffin, began as an island settlement and stayed one until small rivers were diverted in the 18th century. In 1247 Matthew Fitzgriffin was granted three fairs a year. By the early 14th century the Butlers held it, and Edmond Butler was made Earl of Carrick in 1315. Edmund MacRichard Butler built the first bridge in 1447, and Black Tom added the manor house about 1560. In 1649 Cromwellian forces took the town by stealth through an undefended gate, and an Ulster force that tried to retake it lost over 500 killed. The Butlers started a woollen industry in 1670, and by 1799 the population was around 11,000.

In 1799 a barge capsized near the bridge and about 91 people died. Over the next 120 years taxes on the woollen trade, poverty, emigration and the Great Famine shrank the town. It was held by the anti-Treaty IRA until it fell to the Free State army in 1922. Tanning arrived in the 1930s, but emigration was heavy in the 1940s and 1950s, and the closure of the tannery in 1985 hit hard. The SRAM bicycle parts factory brought some recovery in the late 1990s before it closed in 2006.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Carrick-on-Suir ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Tybroughney · holy well · 3 km
• Kilkieran High Crosses · high cross · 6 km
• Ahenny · high cross · 7 km
• Kilmogue Portal Tomb · dolmen · 12 km
• Killamery High Cross · high cross · 14 km
• Killamery · high cross · 15 km
• Ormonde Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Kilcash Castle · castle · 9 km
• Castle Gurteen de la Poer · castle · 12 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Fethard town walls · Ireland's most complete medieval town walls — and set into them, a sheela-na-gig facing the road, a fertility figure guarding a Norman town.
• Kells Priory · Three acres walled and studded with tower houses, which is why it is known locally as the Seven Castles — it looks less like a priory than a fortress. Founded about 1193, and burned three times in its first 150 years, once by Edward Bruce’s army on Palm Sunday 1316.
• Reginald’s Tower · The oldest civic building in Ireland, and the only urban monument in the country still carrying a Norse name. Strongbow married Diarmait Mac Murchada’s daughter Aoife here — the marriage that tied Leinster to the Normans.
• The Comeraghs — Crotty’s rock · William Crotty the highwayman kept to these mountains, and a lake and a crag still carry his name. He was hanged in Waterford in 1742.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.